Well, 1968 is a very significant date. And the year of 1970. Not just for myself, but for our entire social milieu. 1968 was a year of rebellion by college students. Also young lecturers at the University, meaning the young intelligentsia. And that was at the largest university cities in Poland – in Warsaw, in Lodz, in Krakow, Wrocław and Gdansk. Now 1970 was the year for the workers to rebel. In 1968, when the students yelled to the workers “join us, join us” – none of them would join. In 1970 the workers in Gdansk were yelling to the college students, “come with us, come with us.”
Beside [Bogdan] Borusewicz no one joined. [Bogdan Borusewicz was a leading figure in the Polish opposition and a key architect of the Solidarity movement. View his Freedom Collection interview here.] Of course that is an exaggeration that it was just one person – but still, 1968 was the intelligentsia going it alone. 1970 was the workers going it alone. And it was clear to us from the very beginning, even in the 1960s, that any concessions on the part of authorities were out of the question but for a rebellion of the workers.
This is due to the social structure, and also the unique role of the so-called working class in Communist ideology, but also due to circumstances related to the feasibility of organizing a rebellion. The workers, the so-called large-industrial working class means a great accumulation of people in a single place. In our social circles in 1970 all the authority figures for youth were behind bars. So I am speaking of Karol Modzelewski, Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik. [Karol Modzelewski was a Polish dissident and Solidarity activist. Jacek Kuron was a Polish historian who became a leading figure of the opposition and a prominent politician after the fall of communism. Adam Michnik is a Polish journalist and writer and a prominent anticommunist activist.]
They were all behind bars at the time. After 1968 they were sentenced to varying prison terms – from 2 ½ years to 3 ½ years – not too heavy but they had still not come out of prison by that time. Additionally, they were older than we were. An age difference 4 years as between Adam Michnik and myself, or a difference of 18 years as in the case between Jacek Kuron and myself, is a huge difference. So my friends and I aspired to that social circle, we wanted to know them, we wanted to become friends with them. But at the beginning they were too old and later they were in prison, so how were we going to meet them?
Additionally, we were somewhat afraid, as for me at least, I remember thinking that if I was too forward in searching out their friendship then they would think I am a spy. But at any rate, they finally came out of prison. And somehow we finally met up. And in the years, say, of 1973-1974, these were the years of getting to know one another. We organized seminars on history, where we spoke on Poland´s history.
I was a junior lecturer at the University, actually the only one of that generation. But at any rate, I was organizing these somewhat informal contact opportunities, these informal summer camps in Bieszczady, in Beskid Niski, where hardly anybody was living where it was just the empty country. I would invite Adam Michnik – well, at any rate, we had a chance to get to know one another. Also, we got great assistance from the authorities. First of all, Edward Gierek [First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1970 – 1980] was struck with an absolutely brilliant idea to modify Poland’s constitution, and to introduce into it a clause on the everlasting love of the Polish people for the Soviet Union.
Using this, and by reference to mainly scholarly types, mainly university people, we were able to well, perk up, if you like, these social milieus. We started collecting signatures, among writers, among actors – well, not so much among actors at that time but among directors, the professors, lower-level lecturers and scholars. So this was a kind of movement which organized a large segment – there were a large several hundred – it was maybe even upwards of 1000 people who mattered to the intellectual circles in several university cities [Gierek was responsible for unpopular amendments to the Polish constitution that institutionalized the leading role of the Polish Workers Party in the state and Poland’s friendship with the Soviet Union. These amendments were repealed when the opposition took power in 1989.]
You also have to note that this was a time of a social rapprochement of sorts between the left-leaning intelligentsia, whom you could call anti-regime, anti-Communist, democratic and left-leaning intelligentsia, with the [Catholic] Church, which at the time was undergoing a beautiful period of a clear opening up. Secondly Adam Michnik had just published, I do not remember exactly when, I want to say was in 1974, I think 1974 – I do not remember that date exactly, possibly 1973, but I think 74. He published in the Kultura Paryska periodical a very significant book, Kościół, Lewica, Dialog [The Church – the Left – A Dialogue], which was accepted by the significant bishops with extreme interest, is the way that I would phrase it. Also at that time, possibly a year later, Bohdan Cywinski [A Polish writer, historian and Solidarity activist] published his book – Rodowody Niepokornych – [Origins of the Proud & Stubborn Ones].
This was a book which described the story of the unvanquished Warsaw intelligentsia after the January Insurrection. Well, quite a bit after the January insurrection, in response to the debacle of this romantic upsurge of the insurrection, the affirmative action taken, the educational, work at the foundation of society, among primarily the youth of Warsaw in the late 1880s and 1890s and the very beginning of the 20th century [The January Uprising of 1863 was a series of peasant revolts in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus against czarist Russia. Eventually subdued by the Russians, the uprising became a focal point in Poland’s national consciousness.].
The Origins Of The Proud & Stubborn Ones, by Bohdan Cywinski. This book also had significance due to the personality of Bohdan Cywinski. This was a man whom you certainly could not call a leftist. Bohdan Cywinski, the way he lives, his wife lives, they were, you could say, people raised by Karol Wojtyła [Pope John Paul II]. Karol Wojtyła baptized their children, he married them, he would sometimes stop by their apartment to visit in Warsaw whenever he was in town, and through them, at their home he would meet with our representatives, if I may call them that, those of the later Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych [The (clandestine) Society for Educational Courses] and the KOR. [The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) was an anti-communist underground civil society organization in the 1970s, formed to provide assistance to laborers and others persecuted by the government. Many of Solidarity’s leaders were also active in KOR.]
Andrzej Celinski was born on February 26, 1950, in Warsaw, Poland. Celinski graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree in social sciences. After graduation, he became actively involved in several opposition movements including the Workers’ Defense Committee and Solidarity.
Celinski began organizing protests against Poland’s communist regime at an early age. As a teenager in 1966, he rallied thousands of people gathered for a High Holy Mass at Saint John’s Cathedral for a peaceful, anti-government march to the Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw. Celinski joined the 1968 and 1970 protests that were suppressed by the government.
Following the 1980 Lenin Shipyard strike in Gdansk, Celinski was tapped as an expert advisor to the Founding Committee of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the communist bloc. Soon after, the members of the committee recognized his ability for organization and appointed him the secretary of the board of the Founding Committee. In this position, Celinski was tasked with structuring and organizing the body’s meetings. When authorities declared martial law and officially banned Solidarity in December 1981, Celinski was arrested for his activism and spent a year in prison.
After the fall of communism in Poland, Celinski was elected as a senator from Solidarity and served from 1989 to 1993. Celinski was then elected to parliament where he served for over a decade, including a stint as minister of culture from 2001 to 2002 in Prime Minister Leszek Miller’sgovernment.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrzejCeliski1
Poland is a central European country bordered by the Baltic Sea, Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Poland has a population of 38 million people; nearly 90 percent are Roman Catholic.
Poles struggled against foreign dominance from the 14th century and the modern Polish state is less than one hundred years old. Polish borders expanded and contracted through a series of partitions in the 18th century. After a brief period of independence and parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1939, World War II brought occupation by Nazi Germany and the near annihilation of the Jewish population. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Poland’s Jewish population went from over 3 million in 1933 to 45,000 in 1950.
After the war, Poland became a Soviet satellite state and a communist system was imposed. Farms were collectivized, basic freedoms curtailed, and a culture of fear developed under a Stalinist regime. The 1960s brought greater prosperity and some liberalization. Labor protests in the early 1970s tested the communist government’s resolve and prompted modest reforms.
In 1978, Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century. The pope’s triumphant return to Poland in 1979 saw massive outpourings of public support, shaking the foundations of the government and inspiring the opposition to press for peaceful change.
In 1980, shipbuilders in the seaport city of Gdansk united to confront the government. Their calls for greater political liberties and improved working conditions developed into the Solidarity movement. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, became the movement’s voice. Protests and unrest spread throughout the country and the communists replaced their leadership. General Wojciech Jaruzelski became prime minister and declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Solidarity was outlawed and Walesa and other Solidarity leaders were imprisoned.
While martial law was lifted in 1983, Poland continued to stagnate. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 brought new pressures for reform in Poland. A failing economy and continued repression incited workers to a new wave of strikes in 1988. A desperate regime agreed to legalize Solidarity and conduct semi-free elections. In the 1989 parliamentary elections, Solidarity won 99 of the 100 Senate seats and 160 of the 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister in over four decades. In 1990, Lech Walesa was elected president with 74 percent of the vote. While Solidarity splintered as Poland democratized, a coalition government of anti-communist parties won fully free parliamentary elections in 1991.
Poland transitioned to a market economy and applied for integration into western institutions. Economic dislocation returned the former communists, now social democrats, to power in 1993. Free elections and peaceful transitions in the following decades solidified Poland’s multi-party democratic system. Reforms eventually led to a more robust economy and Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union in 2004.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2013, Poland earned the status “Free,” (as it has since 1990) receiving the best possible rankings in the categories Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
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